Home visitation founder Nick Faber, a science teacher, talks with mom Veronica Rendon as she escorts her children Diego (L) and Andrea (R)..the small child is a neighbor child she takes care of...before the start of the school day at Johnson Elementary School in St Paul Tuesday morning November 8, 2011. Volunteer teachers at some of St Paul's elem schools make home visits to the students and their family to better the relationships of teacher/student. (Pioneer Press: John Doman)

Home visitation founder Nick Faber in his science classroom at Johnson Elementary School in St Paul Tuesday morning November 8, 2011. Volunteer teachers at some of St Paul's elem schools make home visits to the students and their family to better the relationships of teacher/student. (Pioneer Press: John Doman)

When the science teacher called Veronica Rendon to say he wanted to drop by her home, she was confused.

Could Diego, her soft-spoken fourth-grader at St. Paul’s Johnson Elementary, be in trouble? Did she need to buy baking soda and other supplies for a science experiment?

The teacher, Nick Faber, explained that he just wanted to get to know the family a little better.

It was an idea as simple as it is foreign in these test-score-crazed times when, experts say, parent outreach remains at best a desultory effort in many public school districts. But in such unscripted, agenda-free introductions, Faber and several dozen other St. Paul educators see an antidote to the mistrust and finger-pointing that can stunt teacher-parent relationships, especially in hardscrabble neighborhoods.

They hope the twice-a-year visits – at times awkward, often eye-opening – will help turn even guarded parents into allies.

As Faber told Rendon, “The better we know you, the better we can serve your kids, and the better teachers we can be.”

AN IDEA WORTH TRYING

At the East Side’s Johnson Elementary, drawing parents in has been a work in progress. At a recent math and science night, about 15 families turned up in a school of 260 students.

Much can get in the way: About 95 percent of Johnson’s students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and almost 40 percent are learning English. But last year, Faber, a 25-year district veteran, learned of a California initiative that got him wondering: “Instead of asking parents to come to us, what if we called to see if we could meet them on their turf?”

The Parent/Teacher Home Visit Project started in the late 1990s at several Sacramento schools plagued by high poverty and low achievement. Parents and teachers had long blamed each other; some educators felt face-to-face straight talk on parents’ turf could help shift the tone from mistrust to partnership.

The formula is clear-cut: Call ahead. Set out in pairs. Ask straightforward questions about the parents’ hopes and expectations.

“Visiting parents at home is the quickest, fastest way to show you care,” said executive director Carrie Rose.

By 2000, the schools in the project could show enough gains in attendance, discipline and test scores to inspire the California Legislature to earmark $15 million for a statewide program.

Districts in more than a dozen states have since set out to replicate the model, which costs the average Sacramento school $10,000 a year in per-visit stipends for teachers and other expenses.

Faber’s principal, Melissa Lehmann, was sold. Johnson is one of the district’s Achievement Plus schools, where nonprofits offer remedies for adult problems that can get in the way of learning, including free health care and job-hunting tips for the unemployed.

Faber approached the school district, but administrators balked at chipping in for a new program at a time of budget-trimming. The St. Paul Federation of Teachers, the local educator union, paid to fly in Rose to train educators – first a core group at Johnson last year, and this fall, for teachers from half a dozen St. Paul schools.

OVERCOMING RESISTANCE

At a daylong Saturday training session last month, Sacramento teacher Jennifer Garcia and parent Yesenia Gonzalez play-acted a home visit phone call for the 25 St. Paul trainees.

Before Garcia could make her pitch, Gonzalez cut her off.

“What did he do?” Gonzalez asked about her imaginary son. “Why are you really calling me?”

Then, when Garcia tried to explain that she just wanted to learn more about the family, Gonzalez interjected again, testily, “Is this going to be like a conference? ‘Cause I hate conferences.”

If Gonzalez, now a Spanish interpreter in the program, sounded remarkably convincing in her role, it was because she was once that parent. A high school dropout whose fifth-grader read at a first-grade level, she felt the public school system had failed her and was now failing her children.

She reluctantly agreed to the home visit, and it planted the idea that she and teachers could be partners in turning schools around.

St. Paul teachers already know they need to sell some parents on the idea. Wendi Storhoff, a teacher at Johnson, got a few of those insistent “What did my kid do?” questions. Quite a few parents told her their lives were just too hectic to have her over for now.

But Faber said most parents get the project’s premise: Outreach doesn’t have to be about troubleshooting or cluing in parents: “We look at parents and say: ‘You are an asset to us. You know something we don’t.’ ”

Debra Landvik, the Minnesota Department of Education’s parent involvement point person, says that’s why the program caught her eye. Get-to-know-you visits are rare.

“Many schools do home visits, but it’s not usually for positive reasons,” she said. “They are going out to homes because there’s trouble with attendance or trouble with behavior.”

Indeed, according to last year’s “Beyond Random Acts” study by the Harvard Family Research Project, schools tend to treat families as bystanders rather than partners, and parental involvement continues to be the missing piece in efforts to turn around struggling schools.

GOING FORWARD

Even before Faber knocked on the door of Rendon’s rental house just blocks from the school on a recent Friday afternoon, he had already gotten to know her kids. Diego and his sixth-grade sister, Andrea, are both well-behaved and curious about science.

But in half an hour, he learned much he hadn’t gleaned in the classroom. In the family’s spotless kitchen, he held fledgling zoologist Andrea’s guinea pig and her turtle, Fast. He found out Diego wants to be a chef – a nugget he later scribbled in his home visit journal as he thought of ways to frame his coming lesson on heat and molecules in terms of cooking techniques.

Rendon, a native of Mexico, shared her hopes: That her kids go to college and that Diego grows up to be a decent man. Faber shared his: That Andrea takes junior high accelerated science next year and that Rendon calls him if her kids seem to fall behind in class.

The visits have helped in sometimes surprising ways.

One teacher walked into a sparsely furnished home and realized her student didn’t have a place to do homework. She arranged for a portable lap desk.

A mom told Storhoff about her daughter’s passion for dance; at the teacher’s invitation, a local Irish dance troupe volunteered to drop by the girl’s after-school program. A newlywed mom who showed Lehmann her wedding album on her living room couch now more readily calls with questions.

“It’s about time,” the mom had said when Lehmann called to say teachers were visiting parents to get to know them. And, teachers have found, when they extend face-to-face invitations to those sparsely attended school events, parents tend to show.

The effort has suffered from lost momentum elsewhere. In California, the birthplace of the project, the program fizzled out at a number of schools amid budget shortfalls and leadership changes. Meanwhile, the idea of making visits mandatory in urban districts such as Chicago and Washington has been met with pushback from educators concerned about safety in rough neighborhoods and already long hours.

In the early 1990s, Landvik was involved with a grant-funded effort at three St. Paul elementaries to make introductory home visits. When the grant ended, so did the visits.

Susan Walker, a parent-outreach expert at the University of Minnesota, says districts have ever less money and time to act on the growing awareness of the importance of outreach. The St. Paul initiative sounds like a promising start, she said – as long as schools go beyond that first visit.

“Those partnerships are not one-shot deals,” she said. “They need to be sustained.”

As you comment, please be respectful of other commenters and other viewpoints. Our goal with article comments is to provide a space for civil, informative and constructive conversations. We reserve the right to remove any comment we deem to be defamatory, rude, insulting to others, hateful, off-topic or reckless to the community. See our full terms of use here.

More in News

Helmets in hand, members of the St. Paul Bicycle Coalition arrived at St. Paul City Hall on Wednesday half expecting an easy victory. A plan to install bicycle lanes on little more than a half-mile of Stillwater Avenue, a busy east-west commuter route east of White Bear Avenue on St. Paul’s East Side, drew multiple supporters and a single opponent, who...

Sol Sepulveda, 64, has been singing since she was a little girl. But until Monday, she had never sung in public. She said she’d been scared to, since her father had insisted on her keeping quiet as a child. Sepulveda, a resident at Ebenezer Senior Care’s Minneapolis campus, was a participant of a theater workshop offered by St. Paul’s Teatro...

The drive-through jokes are starting to get a little old at Mama’s Pizza. For the second time in two years, the renowned Rice Street restaurant in St. Paul’s North End was struck by an errant driver, and this time there was a fair amount of damage. Still, owner Tony Mudzinski said he hopes to get back open in a week...

South Washington County Schools apologized and launched an investigation Thursday after personal and transportation data on most of the district’s 18,000-plus students was mistakenly emailed to parents. District administrators were starting to investigate the data release amid concerns about student safety and legal implications that could stem from the public release of private education data. The private data was contained...

Police say a 63-year-old maintenance worker died when he fell to the bottom of a hotel elevator shaft in Superior, Wis. The accident happened Tuesday evening at the Androy Hotel, authorities said. Hotel staff and other witnesses told police and medical staff that the elevator had been malfunctioning, and that the night maintenance worker was trying to fix it. He...